It was recently reported that Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) Member of Parliament (MP) Daryl Vaz and People’s National Party (PNP) MP Raymond Pryce had a clash of sorts in the House while Pryce was giving a presentation on reparations.

While I disagree with the comments made by Vaz about young Pryce, it occurred to me that Pryce has been bitten by Mike Henry’s bug — that elusive expectation that the taxpayers of Britain and other European nations will ask their tax population to either pony up heavily and pay us (not quite sure who the “us” is) many billions of dollars or, at the least, wipe the slate clean on our debt to members of the European Union.It will not happen.

Of course, it is too much of a passionate subject for politicians to ignore. The moral imperatives are quite sound and it inspires our orators to go off on long speeches, either to occupy time in the House or just to hear themselves talk and talk.

The Barbadian political scientist Hilbourne Watson explained it best.

He said: “The historians and others at the forefront of the reparations discourse in the Caribbean completely overlook the fact that the entire history of all class societies dating back to the distant past is the history of exploitation, which has been bound up with the appropriation of the surplus labour by the class that owned the means of production.

This relationship necessitated the use of force to compel the exploited to toil for them. This fact tells us that the producers of the wealth in those societies — slaves from antiquity, serfs, peasants and workers — could justifiably make a claim for reparations, equally with the descendants of enslaved Africans.”

I can appreciate that someone — like veteran JLP MP Mike Henry — wants to leave his mark on this country, not just as a politician and a minister, but as one who ‘struck the ground’ and made it shake, that is, a person who contributed in a way that made him larger than life.

I can well understand that young Pryce wants a piece of that too. Hilbourne Watson also quoted Karl Marx: “Merchant’s capital, when it holds a position of dominance, stands everywhere for a system of robbery, so that its development among the trading nations of old and modern times is always directly connected with plundering, piracy, kidnapping slaves, and colonial conquest, as in Carthage, Rome, and later among the Venetians, Portuguese, Dutch, etc.” (Marx, Capital Volume III, 1971: 331).

The Barbadian political scientist makes a most cogent point that is curiously or conveniently missing from the Caribbean debate on reparations: “The European ruling classes, which included landlords and the merchants (from the 15th century onwards) could not have carried out the project of enslaving Africans on such a wide scale, without the surplus labour (the wealth) that they had previously acquired from the exploitation of the population over which they ruled during the pre-capitalist era and the early capitalist period.

“Let us be very clear on this: Economic exploitation means that one class has acquired the means (ownership of the tools that produce the necessities of life) to live off the energy of another class. This is the scientific meaning of economic exploitation in the context of class society.

“Without this very basic understanding of the relationship between the ruling, dominant classes (the owners of the means of production whose material existence is based upon the expended energies of the direct producers), and the dominated classes (those who do not own the means of production), we inevitably get caught up in futile and pointless debates.

“The fact is that the European masses were also robbed of their surplus labour, which created the material conditions for enslaving the Africans.

Does this fact not qualify the European working classes for reparations?” Messrs Henry and Pryce, let me ask you this: Do the European working classes also have a case for claiming reparations? Young Pryce, who seemed to have been so struck with his conversation with a member of British royalty and her acknowledgement of his presence and seeming endorsement of his little talk with her needs to know, as Watson so plainly states: “We would like to remind Sir Hilary and his associates that no class or group has ever successfully made its case for transforming the conditions of its existence by basing its appeal on moral suasion.”

You want the British to pay, Sir Pryce? Simple. Get an army and a navy and an air force and do what the British did when it despatched its forces in the early 1980s halfway across the world to protect its rights over the Falkland Islands and take it back, by force, from the generals in Argentina. Do you have such a force, Sir Pryce? observemark@gmail.com